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Painter Mary Pratt found intimacy in everyday objects

No one did light like Mary Pratt. It felt like entire universes dwelled in the unearthly glow her brush would leave behind, and in the most unremarkable of things: A crease of plastic food wrap crinkled by the weight of a shimmering salmon; the sun falling across broken eggshells tucked neatly in their carton; a roast beef riven with gristly veins lying prone on a mirror-sheen silver tray; cod fillets, crumpled in fleshy folds, caught in a late-afternoon glow. Pratt didn’t need anyone to tell her what was extraordinary. She found it all around her.

Indeed, a moment was rarely lost on her because she had so few, the luxury of time and contemplation of subject and material pushed aside by the practical concerns of the everyday. She raised four children in a remote village of Newfoundland while her husband, the celebrated painter Christopher Pratt, would retreat to his studio for hours and days. Her paintings, by necessity, were of those things close at hand, grasped in the stolen moments of naptime and school. In her absolutely mastery of the form lies an equally extraordinary economy of time and a monumental discipline. For the longest time, painting was what she could fit in between the cracks.

Even then, her health was failing — she had made the journey from her home in St. John’s via a private jet, flying low so as not to challenge her fragile breathing — but she was buoyant, gregarious, frank, charming and upbeat. Over a cup of tea at a downtown Toronto hotel, she complained, good-naturedly, that all the medication she’d been taking had made her too sunny, too content, to paint anything at all — “You need to want to fix something,” she told me; “if you’re too happy, what’s to fix?” — but that she’d found solace in a flood of Netflix offerings as she waited for contentment to pass (Lillyhammer, the New-York-gangster-in-Norway tale, was her favourite).

As we sat for almost two hours, she was hilarious, indiscreet and captivating. She told me about her childhood of privilege as the daughter of New Brunswick’s attorney general, and how her marriage (which ended in 1990) took her from high east coast society to that shack in Newfoundland, which she vividly described as being ramshackle enough that “you could drop dimes through the floorboards.”

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Eggs In Egg Crate, 1975

Whatever her health, it felt like she could have told stories all day long. I could have as easily sat as long, just listening.

Over the course of that long conversation, Pratt spoke plainly about what drove her work: The wonder of the moment, a lust to capture and hold the extraordinary in the everyday, which she couldn’t help but see all around her. Of that Newfoundland shack, she complained not at all, but instead told me about the profound experience of watching the snow drip into icicles and into the hundreds of rivulets as the spring thaw advanced, which she saw close-up as she broke the icy surface of a nearby brook.

“I would just think: I am so lucky,” she told me. “Somehow, I always managed to think whatever experience I was having was worth something wonderful.”

When you read about Mary Pratt’s painting, you’ll often hear terms like viscerality and sensuality, the mundane drudgery of the domestic realm transformed by her close observation into something spiritual, something almost holy. All of that is true — no one seized the world at hand quite like she did, and saw the sublime in a moment nearly all of us would simply overlook. She could make the world slow down to an almost impossible stillness.

Salmon on Saran, 1974

But at the root of it all was an intimacy so deep it could leave you feeling vulnerable. That was true of the work, and true of Mary herself. She had an overwhelming ability to connect. A 20-minute chat could feel like a confessional. She had no qualms about baring her soul, and it could feel as though she was looking straight into yours.

In the things most of us took for granted, she found beauty and wonder just by looking closely, placing herself squarely in a moment and watching the world fall away. It was a gift, in her practical-minded way, she likely didn’t see to be as extraordinary as it was.

“Well, where else would you be, other than exactly where you are?” I can almost hear her say, with a laugh. Words to live by.

Murray Whyte is the Star’s art critic based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @untitledtoronto

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